Sleep and Parenting

Adam, do you remember when we brought our now five year old home from the hospital?

No, I don't. Isn't it weird how you just you don't. It's hard to remember these times.

I'm convinced you don't remember them because there is no sleeping, This is true. Do you remember us struggling to get Albi to sleep? Can you remember any of those nights?

That's the first time in your life that you're sort of voluntarily getting out of bed five, six, seven times a night, and then performing tasks you've never performed in your life. You know what I mean. It's like you're just wrapping your head around changing diapers and now you're doing it half asleep, in the middle of the night, in the dark, with a baby putting I would say a little bit of pressure on you by screaming his head off.

I'm convinced that this is the key sleep and parenthood and sleep and family is the key to like happiness.

And especially if you're co parenting, you need to be on the same page.

Quality of sleep and sleep for all four of our family unit with such a priority. And I think this episode is going to be such a gift to parents and families who are listening. Not only will we spend some time talking about parenting and your kids sleep, but we also are going to discuss.

The parent's sleep because that's super important too.

Absolutely.

Hey, it's Katie Low's and I'm Adam Shapiro and this.

Is Chasing Sleep, a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm.

This is Nature's original alarm clock. Probably can't find this as an option on your phone's alarm settings, but it is certainly effective. There may not be a bigger disruption in one sleep than a newborn baby.

Not only that, but how can parents prioritize and sleep train themselves to get a good night's rest at any stage of their child's life. Yes, today we are talking to two great exps. Birds Meg who is the creator of Infinite Connection formerly known as Miss Megan's Method, is a pediatric sleep consultant who has helped a number of families sleep train their children. And she's here with her adorable four month old. Could this baby be cuter? She's so cute. So if you hear a baby crying.

And I'm so impressed that you're doing this with a baby on your lap. Also, joining us is doctor Jade Wu, a board certified behavioral sleep psychologist and researcher. She's passionate about helping new parents overcome sleep challenges during pregnancy and postpartum periods. Later this year, doctor Wu is also launching good Night Mama, a resource and community dedicated to helping pregnant and new moms sleep better and thrive during parenthood. Wow, thank you for joining us.

We need to just give applause all around for the work both of you are doing.

Doctor Wu.

You study sleep and you're already a parent of two very young kids. What has your experience been like with sleep since becoming a parent yourself?

Well, so, I have a three year old and a one year old. I think one learning that I throughout the window was this idea of perfection of if I just go by the science, and if I go by what should happen, and I try to perfect it as much as possible, then things will be fine. But there's actually no perfect when it comes to parenting, when it comes to sleep, and even very good is rare and

Oh, I remember this feeling of like, Adam, do you remember this. My kid would skip a nap and I would feel like a failure and to look at the bigger picture to say it's okay.

And also, I think when we impose a schedule like that, we're actually doing the opposite of what's helpful. And really, I think it's more about rhythms, not schedules. So instead of calculating like, oh, she woke up at three point thirty two pm, therefore her bedtime has to be seven forty two pm, like down to the minute, that just doesn't make sense. Then we're really just imposing arbitrary rules.

Oh that's good to know, because if you're teaching the child to do the same thing at the same time, in the same order every day. How are they going to be resilient and.

Flexible and adaptable? Sure, and exactly.

Thank you Meg from me a mommy and all of us out there. So you've met a lot of sleepy moms and dads through the years. How would you describe your method?

I would say that my method, like really is just a holistic approach of helping the child learn to trust in and of themselves in relation to sleep, in relation to their sleep space, and then trust the caregivers that they're interacting with.

When we had our babies, our first priority was sleep smart.

You know, sleep is ultimately all about self regulation. I feel like I'm a Google translate to baby speak, so to speak, and I teach parents kind of this latter concept that actually helps the child through coregulation to learn how to self regulate.

One of our biggest struggles as new parents is figuring out what to do when the baby is crying. How do each of you approach this?

I mean, I don't use any crde out tactics, but I don't want to avoid, suppress or pacify the child's emotions.

Easy.

I teach a parent what a down cry sounds like, because if the child is having a downcry or is beginning to de escalate, like they are going the right direction on their own.

Right, So communication is kind of just broad strokes at the beginning of life, right, There's just basically a couple of different types of cries that a baby can do to communicate their needs. So I think sometimes in our worst moments, we can feel like, oh, the baby is crying again, getting like this is so frustrating, But you know that this is the only way that the baby

Right.

I remember when Adam and I were dealing with our first and trying to get him to sleep, and he was so much better at listening to crying and just like having a sort of calm response to it, where I like jump to deaf con or so quickly. Do you find that sometimes moms have a much harder time dealing with crying than someone who might.

Be a little bit more emotionally, how do we want to say it?

Adam, stunted, detached, frozen inside.

You know, I think there is something about moms that are just we're just hyper vigilant. Cries sound so aversive to us because we are programmed to respond right away. So that makes sense because evolutionarily speaking, if a baby was left alone, it was either going to freeze to death or get eaten by a tiger right back way back in the day.

Yes, yeah, so you know, babies cry to call for that sense of safety. They're very much anchored to their parent, and it's about being able to like honor the child's communications and listen underneath what they're telling you to you know, address whatever those behaviors are, but also meet those needs.

I think moms feel a lot of guilt too. Some moms finally move the baby out, and they feel so bad that they finally got a better connected few hours because they're not waking up from every fart and burp and rolling sound and gurgle, and it's like, you know.

I totally hear you about that guilt, and I've personally felt that too, even though I know like the science and the you know of how it works. I think that's a little bit of mom guilt is maybe unavoidable. But the reassurance I can offer is this. You know, when you as a mom, when you are sleeping better, you are able to be a better mom during the day.

Yeah.

I totally feel that way personally. I notice in my day to day life on nights where I get a better sleep, I'm a better mom.

Yeah.

So, okay, we have collected this list of things that parents will use to help their children sleep.

And we want to run them by you for your opinion. Okay, here we go.

First, one Meg putting on lullabies or soft music to commobate.

I think that it can be helpful to use a lullaby or music for a child because from a neurological standpoint, they're connecting to sleep from awake with it. But it shouldn't be something that they need all the time forever.

What about you, doctor Wu.

I use music to cueue the beginning of the bedtime routine, but not for the baby to fall asleep. Great, because whatever the baby needs at bedtime to fall asleep is what they need to get back to sleep when they wake up during the night. So you don't want to be playing that song all night long, so you can use it to cue the beginning of the wind down.

But oh wait, wait, what about the fact that you want your kid to know that you have a good voice? Do I do the whole second act of a musical or do I just it's very important to me that they know that you.

Know you can feel free.

What about white noise? We all in my household have an addiction to this. Is that bad or good?

I think it's fine to use it throughout the night. It's studies have shown it to be safe and effective.

And meg, what do you think?

I mean, I think as long as it's below like fifty decibels and so it's not and it's not too close to the child, then I think it's really a personal preference.

But if you got trash trucks all morning.

Some of the deepest sleepers are in New York City and they do not use white noise, And some of the families use white noise to kind of make a wall of sound and drown out the startling outside noises. So I think it really is a personal preference, and it depends on the situation.

I like that, all right. What about melatonin?

Never use melotonin without a doctor's guidance.

Good to know.

It is not a sleep aid.

And it is not just a benign vitamin gummy that your kid can take. It's a hormone and taking it at the wrong time, at the wrong dose can backfire, and it can also have other effects that we may not be aware of for such a young person.

I completely agree with Jade.

Parents are giving melatonin to children as young as eighteen months old. They don't understand that it's dangerous.

I had no idea.

I guess people feel such accessibility to it because it's just over the count, like it has cute cartoons on it, and it's over the counter.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, I'm thinking, right, that's actually a problem that's over the counter. When it's over the counter, it's not FDA regulated, And a study found that the dosage has been as high as five times higher than what's advertised on the label. So if you think you're giving a one milligram, you don't want to overdose your kid on melatonin. Yeah.

We're going to get into this on an upcoming episode about sleep and supplements, But I got to tell you this is shocking.

There's more Chasing Sleep In a moment, Welcome back to Chasing Sleep, where Katie and Adam a couple of parents, we're learning all about sleep and parenting from sleep scientists doctor Jade Wu and Meg from Infinite Connection.

What age should kids be sleeping in their own room and in their own beds?

I right away, Ah, this is a biggie.

I mean, look, being that you are a doctor, is there a recommended age?

So there's a couple of answers to this. I'll start with the official answer from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and they recommend sleeping in the same room for six months and then you can transition your baby to a separate room after that. But in reality, there's a huge range and cultural preferences in family ability to have separate space and siblings and all sorts of different variations, So

Interesting that idea about the whole family system. I wanted to ask about the parents specifically because Katie and I know firsthand how important it is for parents to get the sleep that they need. So when we were doing our homework for this episode, we dug into Mattress Firms newly published Sleep Uncovered report about the effect of parenting on sleep, and they surveyed more than fourteen hundred parents and non parents and found that there's a big difference

Bed, right, Katie, so many tasks, I mean before bed there's bath and bedtime and books and brushing tea and the different nighttime diper sal machine.

And then make sure you passage deserve next day.

Exactly a lot of tasks. Now, by the time we get the kids down, that time before we had to bed ourselves is the only chance we get to do all the stuff that we weren't able to do during the day. And that's paying bills, it's putting ourselves on tape for three auditions, it's returning emails, it's exercising.

Only Adam exercises at night. I do not do that.

I like a nighttime exercise.

Wow, I'm impressed.

Building on what Adam said, the Parenting Report found that parents also carry a lot more of that mental burden, especially before bed. It's like they're significantly more likely to go to bed feeling stressed or angry or upset or nervous, which Man, I can really relate to big time. So I want to know what are your thoughts, like, do parents sabotage their sleep with these habits?

Sadly not surprised to hear any of these findings. I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is you're right, Adam, that parents simply have more stuff they got to get done. Or there's something called have you heard of revenge bedtime procrastination? No, it's this concept that originated in China where people are notoriously stressed out

Yeah, this is what I'm doing, Katie.

You're like, I don't want to go to bed right now because I didn't even have time to do something I like to do.

I'm so angry that sometimes just to like not go to sleep, I'll just be like, hence the revenge doing all my stuff, you know, to really show how much I still have my life in my things that are just mine. But then, of course, inevitably I just end up looking at pictures of my children from five years ago.

I know I do that too.

Yeah, So it's really tough for parents because we're always juggling this emotional rollercoaster of like I love my kids, there are a total pain in the butt, yes, you know. So we're holding so many emotions, holding so many responsibilities, and holding so many tasks. It's like, do you ever feel like your brain has like forty tabs open, like like a browser tab, you know, just because there are so many tasks that you have to keep track of and so many schedules to coordinate, and like it's like

Yeah. I find most of the parents their head hits the pillow and their their minds are spinning with anxiety about parenting and you know, how to fit it all in their day and how to manage their time, and so you know that's that's definitely one side of it. But I would say more often than not, when the parents start sleeping, they come back to me like, uh, we're pregnant again.

So when you have all of that going on, your brain is busy. Your brain is holding all this stuff. It's not putting that stuff down, So it's much harder to get good quality sleep.

Can we just talk about older kids and how sleeping changes with older kids? Can you talk a little bit about that, doctor Ruber, Like, you know, kids seven to ten, that's what we're going about to run into, Katie.

Yeah.

Sure.

So, first of all, sleep does change very rapidly throughout childhood, so the amount of sleep that child needs tends to decrease, but also the timing too. So you've probably heard of chronotype, that's your biologically hardwired preference for sleeping at a certain time. Teenagers are night owls. Younger kids are mourning people. So somewhere in the early adolescence puberty kind of window, the

I had no idea.

Also, is it cool that my husband is still on the whatever the teenager system is.

Yes, that's totally normal, Thank you, doctor Rue.

Think of it this way evolutionarily speaking, you know, if everybody in the tribe fell asleep at the same time and woke up at the same time, then everybody is a snack.

Right, some of us have to stay up a little later, Katie, protect the family from the.

Bears exactly, and be the night watchmen. Oh, that's what you're doing, your protect dance.

You know. Evolutionarily speaking, you're welcome from us night owls to mourning people. And that's actually one major thing I work with parents on is often night owl parents suddenly find themselves needing to fake being a morning person right because their baby wakes up earlier. Their child wakes up early. So there are ways that you can actually kind of shift your chronotype, maybe not permanently, but at least do it in a way where you can function and not feel so bad.

Doctor wru from your pet. What piece of advice is usually the hardest to fit into parents' lives.

So I always say to people when your baby, who's no longer newborn but like an older baby, when they cry for you during their sleep time, walk don't run, because when you run to respond to them, you may actually be interrupting a natural process where they're figuring out how to self soothe. We can show them, we can co work with them, co regulate with them, but then they also need some opportunities to try on their own.

And also it calms you down, like just having you in my head. Like just if I could hear doctor Wu.

Being like Katie, walk, don't run, it would like change eye energy, which I think is also very helpful. And Meg, how about you, what else do you suggest to help keep parents calm?

Actually I was going to talk about habit stacking. You know, we've in new healthy habits that you can, you know, make a choice to spend a little more time in nature, you know, go take a height, have some gratitude practices, And I would just say that most of the time parents just need, you know, a hot shower, hot baths, some abs and salts and essential oils, some time to decompress, some self care.

Oh yeah, now she's talking your language, Katie.

By the way, this is why my nighttime I do it. I'm a nighttime shower person. Yeah, and it's where I shower every night, but mostly because I have my smells, my sense, but it's I think it's where I decompress my thoughts, yeah, before I get into my bed.

And you can also just rinse away all the energy from the day and have that cleansing and go into bed like fresh and clean, and you know, make sure that you're changing your sheets. Definitely, you want to have like clean bedding, fresh bedding.

The self care really is like these these habit stackings of things to self care that make your sleep a priority throughout your child's life.

Yeah, it's really about slowing down. I find even with the children that I'm working with, I come into these family dynamics and the parents are rushing them around to classes and activities and playing, and you know, their routines and their meal times, and they're doing all these things for the child. Sri Maria Montessori says this really well, like don't do anything for the child that the child

I feel like I just got some self care by just listening to that.

Absolutely, this has been a great conversation, Doctor Will. Before we go, let's get some practical advice. What is one piece of advice you would give to weary parents to help them get better sleep tonight.

How about we do something during the day. So this is actually a two parter. The first part is you set aside fifteen minutes to do nothing but worry. Sure, yes, to worry on purpose. So all the stuff that's like nagging at you and your mind, all the stuff that you still haven't gotten done yet, all the annoying day to day things. Do that in a concentrat of fifteen minutes,

I love that.

This is huge for me because I have a lot of those, you know, Sunday scaries or like nighttime anxiety, like for some reason, when everything gets quiet and dark is where my brain goes into hyperdrive.

And I think you're right.

I think it's because I don't allow myself to do it at all during the day.

Mm hmmmm hmmm.

So if I had a quiet fifteen minutes where I could just throw it all up or put it in the litter box exactly, then maybe it would be out.

Yeah.

And the other half of this that's really important is you want to be mindful outside of that window of time. So mindfulness just means being in the here and now. So just enjoy playing with your kid, or enjoy eating, enjoy walking, whatever it is you're actually doing in the moment, do that fully, and that actually helps you sleep better at night.

Right, doctor Woo, What are the positive outcomes we can hope for when our kids have healthy sleep habits?

Well, two answers for you. One short term is that whenever a baby gets better asleep and gets enough sleep, they are happier, they are healthier, they are learning things. And the long term, I think we are really gifting our children with the gift of setting up a good relationship with sleep right from the get go. I work with so many patients who are in their twenties or thirties or all throughout the adult lifespan, who say, you know, I was never a good sleeper as a kid.

There was just like chaos.

I never had a regular bedtime, or my mom always complained about me not being good sleeper. And now they're dealing with insomnia, they're dealing with, you know, all sorts of sleep problems, and I'm just thinking, Wow, I wish I could turn back time and help you be a.

Good sleeper as a baby from the.

Get go, because this relationship, healthy relationship with sleep is really a gift of a lifetime.

That's it.

That's it, that's the whole kit and kaboo mic drop. I am so grateful for learning that and being able to take it with me that sleep really is a gift of a lifetime. It's profound and important. And I'm just sitting here with endless amounts of thanks to both Meg from Infinite Connection and doctor Jade Wu for their insights on chasing sleep?

Katie. Is this why we don't do double dates with non parents anymore?

I mean, we learned a lot about ourselves today. Sure, huge thing I wish I had known. Mommy needs to go put away the melatone in that I definitely have in our kids.

Yeah, Katie, get rid of that melotone, and we don't know that's not over the counter stuff, and it might might not even be the right dosage.

I mean, look, let it be clear.

I do not give our children a melotone every night, but definitely when we travel and we're getting on a different sleep schedule, Like if we go to the East Coast, it is at our family and it's three hours later and they're all confused about what time it is. I don't want them waking up at four am, and I

Oh and can we talk about the fact that teenagers should ideally be starting school later. Wait a minute. If that's science was around when I was a teenager, I would have gone to Yale, Katie, But I was a complete waste of space for the first two maybe three hours of high school. Every day you are.

A night owl, and that is okay. Honestly, from this podcast, it sounded like doctor Wu was a little bit of a night owl.

Herself and she's a doctor.

Yeah, oh Katie, why do you get to schedule your worry time?

Okay, my worry time today is going.

To be between two thirty and three.

Nice, I got a good thirty minutes worth.

Train that mental kitty, Katie. I just wanted to say thank you to you for a great episode.

One hundred percent. You can also follow us.

I'm kat q Low's on Instagram and Adam is Shabby Shapps on Instagram. And also we're going to be posting a ton about this podcast, so you can also leave comments.

And I want to say thank you to our audience for listening and for them to tune in next week when we talk about sleep and aging, which I feel like is very connected to this episode, And don't forget to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode and until next time, hope you're living your best while sleeping your best.

Chasing Sleep is a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm.

Our executive producer is Molly Soosha.

This show was written and produced by Sound That Brands, Dave Beesing, Jason Jackson, and Michelle Rice.

Chasing Sleep is hosted by Katie.

Lows and Adam Shapiro.

Thank you to our partners at Mattress Firm.